Our girls are in trouble due to the lack of positive female leadership they have in their lives.

It’s only after a conversation with a friend about how far we’ve progressed in our womanhood that I realized how lucky I am to be where I am in life.

I was a delinquent teenager. For years I couldn’t stand my mother. I loved booze and boys and getting into fights, and I had a weapon drawn on me on more than one occasion despite living in one of the nation’s safest towns. I was heading down a bad path.

I had an intact family. On paper. A dad and a mom that cared about a brother that I perpetually fought with and me. We had nice family portraits and the like but no real adhesive that bonded us all together.

Things have changed since then. My parents split, and my brother and I have moved out and made something of ourselves and, ironically, we’re all closer than we ever have been. But I know now just how different my present could look if I didn’t become so set on becoming a woman in my own right.

“Girls are more likely to achieve if they have emotionally healthy achieving women to look up to. Moms are the best role models, as long as they give their daughters healthy messages and take the time to be with them,” writes Sylvia Rimm, an American psychologist specializing in parenting, child development, and learning.

“When good moms aren’t around, dads and teachers need to search elsewhere…fathers can also be effective role models and mentors to girls, but they are likely to be more acceptable to girls if women in the environment validate them. That happens because girls seem to have a need to reassure themselves of their own femininity.“

Bingo. Girls and women absolutely have a need to reassure ourselves of our femininity. For some of us, the reassurance comes through intellect, for others, physicality. The bottom line is women thrive when competing against one another. It’s why we landed on the moon and broke the four-minute mile.

This leads us to our current state of cultural and societal disarray. We’re in a world where youth sports leagues are slowly doing away with keeping score, where all physicality is being banned from schoolyards, where female aggression is being medicated and where roughly 85% of elementary school teachers are men. Where and when is a girl supposed to explore her femininity? Satiate her craving for competition?

As I said, I was one of the lucky ones. I had the benefit of being an excellent athlete and I captained my high school’s baseball and football team in my senior year. I also had teachers, specifically two female teachers, who cared. They saw I had a penchant for writing and forced me to succeed. I highly doubt I’d have ever gone to university had those two not made themselves an important part of my high school education.

But I look around and can’t help but feel that many girls growing up in 2016 won’t have the same luck I did.

As I write this, a five-year-old girl and her twin brother – they’re my neighbors – are outside riding their bikes, playing in the dirt and picking up toads in the garden. They’re great kids, and I’ve gotten to know them and their father quite well over the past few months.

Their mother is more or less non-existent. She’s in and out of jail. She promises them she’s going to pick them up from school and then never shows. When she does show, she’s distant. I’ve never seen her give her kids a proper hug.

Knowing that they don’t play any organized sports and that they attend an average Canadian public school, which is dominated by male teachers, these kids have very little in the way of positive female role models in their lives. This is going to affect both of them negatively, but the young girl will feel the brunt of not having a mother-figure around because females are far more likely to fall into drugs, gangs, and homelessness than males.

So I go outside and play catch with them and talk with them and help their dad set up a hammock in the front yard. And in return, they bring me snacks, smiles, hugs and a sense of gratitude that’s so unique to children.

I don’t know how to fix the lack of great female role models. Maybe we need to encourage more young women to get into teaching or starting after school programs. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting to know your neighbors. Or maybe I am approaching a 21st-century problem from a 20th-century angle. Perhaps the next great female role models are already out there on YouTube and Facebook. After all, that’s where I found many of my role models.

Regardless, parents and educators need to take a look at the numbers and the facts: kids – particularly young girls – need good women in their life and those women have to challenge them, and they have to be dependent. If we raise good girls, we raise good mothers and if that should happen, then maybe then we can start remedying the dysfunctional mess that is the modern family.